James Poulos writes about political news, focusing on our choices for liberty and our options for reform. He's a columnist at The Daily Beast, the host of the Free Radicals podcast, and the frontman of a band called Black Hi-Lighter.

I'm Glad Clay Aiken Is Running For Congress, And You Should Be Too

The instinctual reaction: nooooo! But, after all, Aiken is now 35 years old. Serving constituents is a better option than dinner theater. Linda Holmes at NPR does a pretty good job of teeing up the case for taking Aiken seriously (enough):

Clay Aiken probably wouldn’t even make the Top 500 on a list of Silliest Humans To Run For Office This Year. He sings, he dances (sort of), he used to be a special ed teacher, and once he gets over the hurdle of reminding people that this time around they can only vote for him once, there’s no telling how far he might go. For good or for ill, running for office has never been limited to those with a spotless history of being taken seriously.

But we can go even further. We now possess more celebrities — and “former” celebrities — than any civilization at any time in history. And there’s no end in sight. Whether stretches of renown last fifteen seconds, fifteen minutes, or fifteen years, America is now becoming a vast, shuffling gray area between the completely obscure and the utterly famous.

Nevertheless, two kinds of bothersome prejudice remain. On the one hand, we’re inclined to look askance at past and present celebs when they attempt to function as “ordinary” citizens. We laugh at them, we mock them, we distrust them, we feel awkward, we roll our eyes. On the other hand, recovering celebrities find themselves facing their own experience of discomfort and frustration. Where do you go from stardom? The sensation is: down, down, into not just obscurity but the oblivion that accompanies a life lived out by rote, without inspiration.

I don’t care if you’ve been a celeb or not — you’ve probably tasted at least once the depression and panic brought on by wondering seriously if you’ll never live into your dreams (again). Culturally speaking, Americans would grow much healthier, and fast, if they came to agree that ordinary lives can be well worth living, because ordinary lives can actually be sites of extraordinary, unpredictably rich relationships.

No matter how ridiculous you might find Aiken, you should admit that his candidacy helps drive home this crucial cultural lesson.

Post 2010, the once-purplish second district [this is North Carolina we're talking about here] was redrawn to be solidly red. (Romney pulled 58 percent of the vote there in 2012.) If you think Simon Cowell can be brutal, just wait until the GOP starts slinging mud and lobbing bombs to protect one of its own in this southern enclave it’s worked so diligently to hold on to.

It’s good to see anyone who’s had a solid brush with fame attempt to achieve something outside the entertainment sandbox — especially where failure is a very real possibility. One of the best ways to exploit the “privilege” and “exposure” afforded by celebrity is to plow those resources into risky real-life endeavors. It’s nice that famous rich people such as Dr. Dre are finding ways of amping up the economy as they transition away from careers as full-time entertainers. But Dre isn’t going to be ridiculed or shunned if, for some reason, Beats goes belly up. Aiken, by contrast, has more skin — by which I mean status — in the game he’s playing.

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